


Limitless Power

by God1643



Series: Incomplete Works: Up For Adoption [1]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, Random Omnipotent Being - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24970888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/God1643/pseuds/God1643
Summary: Taylor is removed from the Locker by a Janitor before she can trigger, but even though her Shard hadn't been awoken by her screams, didn't mean that another Entity hadn't heard her.And, considering he's older and finds Scion rude and bratty, he's more than willing to throw a wrench into The Cycle and laugh at Scion's consternation.
Series: Incomplete Works: Up For Adoption [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1807423
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	Limitless Power

She had bleeding in the brain, a result of a physical altercation with another student. Her father stood over her laid-out body, his fists were trembling in rage and there was practically steam rising out of his ears.

“What can be done?”

“In this particular location, the injury is in-operable. All we can do is hope that she pulls through.” The doctor’s voice wasn’t usual, wasn’t their standard medical monotone full of false sympathy.

Doctor Maria Michaels was trembling, speaking through gritted teeth, her hands itching to cover themselves in blood, and not in the ways she normally did as a surgeon.

Everyone knew their patient.

Taylor Annette Hebert; first and only child of Daniel and Annette Hebert, was the Angel of the Dock Workers Union, a sort of strange mascot. She ran around the Docks during business hours, offering help and morale just through her sheer presence when she was young, and then with actual unpaid labor when she grew old enough to use the various processes they employed.

She was regarded as something of a prodigy, absorbing practical theory like a sponge, and her strangely steady hands offered some great use in thermal-lance cutting and her legible handwriting was great to assist in consumables inventory work.

Every single person in the DWU thought of Taylor as either a younger sister or a niece, and each of them were fiercely protective. It was a fucking miracle that the simmering anger in the workforce hadn’t boiled over into riots outside Winslow High School, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time.

“It’s time, they need a distraction.” Danny said to himself, kissing his daughter on the forehead and then pulling his beloved Annette-knitted beanie over his receding hairline.

“What are her chances of making it through?”

“Nineteen to thirty percent.” Maria said, practically snarling the last word. Danny nodded and embraced his old friend, and then shrugged on his great-coat.

“Keep her as stable as you can manage.” She nodded and called out an affirmative at his retreating back, wincing as he calmly opened the door to the outside and gently shut it.

When Daniel _fucking_ Hebert started moving that measured, someone was about to get their shit kicked in.

“Longshoremen! Stevedores! To Me!” Maria heard his voice echo over the yard, and then the great scraping of commissary table benches and generally agitated voices.

“It’s time. I’m done waiting.” He called again.

“The Ferry?” Asked Dimitri, an old russian man and the second-longest running member of the DWU. Danny nodded, the falling snow already turning his wiry beard greyer by the second.

“Get the floats, assemble the cables. Drain the ninth dry dock to sixty percent and prep the grapples.” Dimitri and three others rushed off with their orders, as Danny turned to face the greater crowd. “Anyone here with the nuts…” There was a cough in the crowd. “Or the vulva…” Danny corrected his statement. “To get in this cold fucking water, get a drysuit and begin thermal shock therapy. We’re shifting the old Ferry and starting up the dredges.”

There was a cheer.

“Overtime is increased by twenty five percent for the duration of this project, with another thirteen percent for those of you who pull your children from Winslow as was proposed as a protest.” The cheer was deafening.

“Those with military experience who are itching for some conflict again, you’re with Petrov on clearing out the Merchants from the Southern Docks.” Danny actually had to pause on the volume from this one.

“Those of you with friends in the Shipping, Postal Service, Janitors, Lunch-Personnel or Teachers’ Unions, let them know that Danny Hebert wants to speak to their Union Presidents. The request will seem more important coming from the bottom up.” Those mentioned nodded and rushed for the Admin Building, and the phones there.

While Danny was doling out orders and generally being a badass in the outer-world, an entirely different type of verbal exchange was occurring in the meta-physical world.

“Where am I?”

“ _You’re in a space that mortals have not resided in a very long time._ ” Replied a voice, instantly setting Taylor on edge. Anything that referred to people as ‘mortals’ wasn’t something to piss off, she’d read enough fantasy stories to know that. Her sarcasm, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be aware.

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

The voice seemed to pause, in what Taylor initially feared was rage, but actually seemed to be shock. The voice chuckled once, then the air around Taylor’s consciousness seemed to weigh more.

“ _Funny, but the sass isn’t exactly necessary_.”

“Is this Death?”

“ _Close, but not quite. This is the space mortals enter before they are gifted powers._ ”

“You’re gonna make me a cape?” Taylor felt… actually kind of annoyed. The overwhelming feeling in her was that the voice was a little late.

“ _No. None of the powers you are familiar with in recent years, gifted from the one you call Scion. I am the One, the entity that gifted the Old Powers. The ones long dismissed as myth in humanity. What the uneducated masses once called Magic, or demonic abilities.”_

“Oh, how comforting.”

“ _Watch your cheek, child…”_ The voice began, seemingly ramping up for a rant.

“I can’t, I’d need a mirror.” Taylor snapped, the sarcasm and bitterness overriding pretty much every rational center she had. The Voice seemed to pause again, but this time the air felt lighter and it began to cackle, sounding like it felt genuine mirth.

“ _A good joke, young one. Fair enough, the powers will be there when you wake up. I was going to offer you details on what they are, but I’d rather you had no preconceptions on their limits. Something tells me your mind will find new ways of doing things that I have not seen in a very long time. Good luck_.”

The void faded away, and Taylor slipped back into unconsciousness.

“ _Danny?_ ” The voice crackled through the radio, one of the three he kept on his hip. Danny removed it with a swift motion, the black plastic almost making a chirping noise with how fast it abraded against the leather of his belt.

“Maria? Got an update?” His voice quivered, but Maria didn’t call him on it.

“ _Taylor’s scans came back clean, the bleeding has stopped, and her brainwaves have remained steady for the last fifteen minutes. She should be safe for you to visit, and should come to consciousness soon._ ” Maria replied rapidly, the noise behind her raucous. Clearly the DWU Nurses were also excited.

“Thanks, Maria. I’ll be down in a bit.” Danny slid the radio back onto his belt and turned back to the crowd. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Taylor has pulled through. The worst is over.” If Danny had thought the previous cheers were loud, this was _earth-shaking_.

“Dimitri? You and Edward can handle things from here?”

“ _Da_ , _Daniil_ . Go see your _doch_ and tell her we say hello.” Dimitri replied, already turning to begin calling out additional instructions and then to alert Edward of his temporary managerial role. Dimitri was steady, and Edward was dependable, but they had to work together to barely match the instinctual leadership Danny was so good at.

Danny led his workforce like an orchestra, spinning in place more than he walked places and calling out instructions, yelling advice, and calling people on mistakes they hadn’t even noticed before they became issues, in a way that left most people _fucking breathless_.

Danny ensured he drove safely on the golf-cart back to the Nurse’s Office/Commissary, he didn’t imagine slipping on ice and cracking open his skull was exactly what his daughter needed from him right now.

Taylor knew the second she came to consciousness that something was different. The air… _tasted_ different than usual. And not in the way most hospitals usually did, and she knew it was a hospital from the railing on the bed that kept her leg from falling off the side, and the idle beeping of her pulse monitor.

But most hospitals just smelled of bleach, Taylor could do _more_ than smell now. She tasted things in the air, copper like pennies, a burning in the back of her mouth that she knew as the same as what came from a space heater but was more likely the building-wide heating system.

But the weird one was… _salinity_.

Not saltwater or salt in the air, she knew that too well, just from how it burrowed into her father’s clothes and how it permeated their home, this was more like… when she tasted one of her own tears.

She opened her eyes.

“ _Holy shit_.” She said, in perfect unison with the person next to her bed. She turned to look, and her father was seated there, his brown eyes concealed behind his square glasses as always. His great coat was hung on a hook near the door, but his beloved beanie still sat precariously on his head.

“What’s wrong?” Taylor asked, more out of societal reflex than anything else, as she choked down on her own panic. She was really hoping this was a side effect and not a ‘gift’ from that dream ‘entity’.

“Your eyes.” He replied. And there went her hopes.

“So whatever is causing me to see in heat signatures is more than just in my head?” Her voice was _far calmer_ than what she was feeling, a trait she got from both her parents.

“You’re blinking sideways. Annette called that a nictitating membrane, and said humans had lost ours about eight evolutionary cycles ago.” Danny replied, his voice also too calm. Neither commented on how weird it was that he remembered that off the top of his head, assigning it to the panic response throwing information at a problem.

“That’s weird.” She said. They sat in silence.

“It’s kinda cool. Annette would like it. She always said my eyes were like a lizard, but they work with you.” Danny said, almost like he was offering the words as opposed to really saying them.

“That’s still weird.” Taylor blinked, slower this time, and _felt_ both sets of eyelids close and open. The sideways happened first, for some reason.

“Anything else that’s new?”

“I can see the heat signatures through the eyelids. That might make sleeping difficult.”

“Can you disable the heat vision?”

“I don’t know, Dad. _Can_ I disable this power I just got and don’t understand.”

“Honey, just try. The sarcasm is appreciated…”

“As long as it is united with action. Yes, I know. It was Mom’s favorite thing to say.” Taylor replied, but tried to will the sight away. It took a moment, and felt like something slipping away in her head, but the glowing stopped. The radiator looked like it was painted white as opposed to glowing a dull blue, and her father went back to tanned and swarthy as opposed to actually orange.

“It stopped.”

“That’s good. Maria will be here in just a minute, and she’ll give you a full physical. You know her, and you know she knows when you’re lying. Not saying you would, but there might be things you don’t want to admit. I just want you to know, the DWU has kicked into high gear.” Danny smiled as he said it.

“All the unions in the city that we have pull with have agreed to withhold their services from Winslow High School until your assaulters are properly punished, and every parent here has pulled their child from it as a protest. Principal Blackwell has been rather desperately calling my office intermittently for the last little while.”

Taylor couldn’t help it, the image of that bitch panicked, worriedly smashing in the buttons on her phone receiver made her start cackling madly, Danny laughing along.

The hallway exploded with motion, bustling steps of dozens of people as The Dockworkers formed into lockstep, surrounding a physically-weakened Taylor on her approach to

Winslow. She was dressed relatively normally, but had decided to make a statement and had worn cut-short thermals to keep away the chill and tight shorts, the ensemble only there to reveal the bloodied bandages on her calves.

It was heartwarming that so many of her Union colleagues were willing to skip work for her, and that their children were willing to do the same. Initially she had felt bitterness at the idea that these children had known and done nothing, but her father had explained in painstaking detail the issues each of them were dealing with.

Winslow was such a hotbed for shitty situations that hers was almost… tame. Not truly, it had resulted in an attempt at premeditated homicide via bio-infectious assault, but compared to a gang that was set against your entire skin color encroaching into your neighbourhood, Taylor felt that her situation could have been worse.

She still had a father, and had previously had a loving mother of great intelligence. She wasn’t pretty enough to be a ‘Princess’ the term for a girl who was so beautiful that it was almost entirely inevitable she would be enslaved into one of the brothels, and she didn’t live in substandard housing.

And most of all, she wasn’t anything but white in a largely E88 run section of Brockton, the section that bussed children to Winslow. Gang tats were such points of pride in Winslow because it meant that the neighbourhood of the tatted members was then claimed by that gang.

With Hookwolf’s volatility, Kaiser’s ferocious racism and Cricket’s craving of violence, against _Lung_ , the city was not neatly carved up by calm treaty like it had been under The Allfather and Marquis.

The Merchants were sort of everywhere, with a central hub rigged with Squealer’s defenses, but the ABB and E88 were constantly scrambling for space.

There wasn’t a set Aryan neighbourhood where the whites moved to not be harassed by the ABB, because within a month’s time such a territory would be conquered by a particularly pissed Lung, and vice versa for asian neighbourhoods and a drunken Hookwolf.

The only constants for the ABB was the space that had been a refugee camp for Kyushu Survivors, and the Ruby Dreams Casino.

The only constants for the E88 was the Medhall Building and Allfather’s Manor, a subterranean complex that seemed to only exist for Kaiser’s inner circle, Hookwolf’s Chosen and in rumours.

In summary, Taylor was pretty well off.

As such, it made it easy for her to accept the support graciously, almost laughing at picturing Sophia’s face when confronted with fourty marching Dockworker’s kids escorting her to class.

It was almost like a new gang had formed, which Danny’s second in command, a massive brick of a man named Kurt, had joked was what happened. When Danny scolded him, Kurt had made it clear that the Union was a gang, albeit an honourable one, and Kurt had already drawn up a Tag to mark Dock territory as theirs.

It technically already was, by legal deed no less, but the rundown parts were mostly ignored and the new distribution of Tags at boundaries would hopefully keep out enterprising Merchants.

The doors to Winslow burst open before the two biggest boys, a black freshmen named Lucas who was already six eight and a solid three hundred pounds, and a white senior barely touching six feet but a brick of muscle, having already worked co-op in the Union and understandably muscled.

The Trio had been waiting a few feet from the door, obvious in their intent to mock Taylor as soon as she entered, but they hadn’t expected the four thousand pounds worth of muscle that was nearly four dozen Dockworkers’ kids that fanned out around Taylor.

“Hello girls. I hope you know that I have not forgotten what you did.” For just the tiniest second, the girls thought they saw Taylor’s eyes appear reptilian, coldly gleaming, before the image was gone and they werely brown and… well, still cold as all fuck, in honestly.

“What should we care? We didn’t have anything to do with your dumbass falling into that locker. Everyone knows you locked yourself in for attention.” Apparently, Madison had decided to open.

She was instantly surrounded by ten of the female DWU kids, their broader shoulders and athletic builds stoically fencing off any escape for Madison.

“Does she think people think she’s clever for saying things like that?” One of the girls asked another, using a favoured tactic of the Trio against Taylor. The only difference was, when that happened, Taylor could walk away. Ten girls stopped Madison from leaving.

“She _has_ to know she’s just the school slut.” Another said. A third scoffed derisively.

“Know? This walking thigh-gap couldn’t string a thought together if her life depended on it.”

“It’s probably from her mother. You know, that slut who got her liver done in for shooting too much of that Merchant shit and taking all those STD’s?”

“It’s obviously from her mother. You remember she was teaching Madison how to sell herself when she was underage? That poor guy got about nine STD’s just from ickle Maddie’s mouth.”

“Can you imagine what her other holes would be like? She’s probably so stretched out she has to wear diapers under those slutty skirts.”

Madison was visibly shrinking.

The DWU girls had got together the prior night and decided the best way to do this. Taylor had admitted that the Trio and their hangers-on technique was so easy to ignore both because the ‘biting’ questions were based off false information and that each dumb insult contradicted the one that was two before it.

They had rehearsed this a dozen times, keeping the narrative consistent, flowing, and based off true things that the community knew about the now-divorced Missus Clements. The teaching to sell herself was admittedly a bit stretched, but Madison and her mother had indeed given a man a blowjob, and Herpes in the process.

“ _It’s in a language you humans no longer use. It means ‘Willful Coincidence’, and it covers more things than you could possibly imagine currently._ ” The voice was back, the one she had heard before awakening in the hospital.

“I… I don’t understand.”

“ _Your power bends reality around you. You can lift anything, not because you are super strong, but because the thing that you wish to lift becomes lighter than it was when you place your hands on with the intent to lift. A man with lethal intent against you dies at your self defense not because you have lethal fingers, but because his body suddenly realised it was supposed to die when you needed him to stop._ ”

“So I’m going to be killing people accidentally?!” She asked aloud, panicking. Luckily, there was no one around to hear that alarming sentence.

“ _No, Taylor. Your Will creates Coincidence. If you want someone dead, they will develop a heart disease. If you want a villain to stop being villainous, they will happen to have a crisis of conscience about something they just did. All it requires is a strong enough intent, or line of sight. Think of the good you could do._ ” The Limitless Entity’s voice was calming, a strange tone for Taylor, as she usually heard the voice in either snark or laughter.

“But… what about the bad I could do?” She whispered, guiltily.

“ _The very fact that you think to ask such a question, with such a tone, is why I chose you for my power. In nine hundred Earth years, I have not seen a single person worthy of my abilities besides you._ ” Taylor blushed ferociously, taking the full impact of that, as, against her will, her modesty response get crushed by The Entity’s power.

The Entity wanted her to _understand_ what that sentence meant.

_“Others have come close, but they did not need my power to do what they did, they only had to be human because they were facing human threats. You will inevitably face something that Humans can only do so much against._ ” The Entity paused, so Taylor could absorb everything he said.

_“When I heard your mind screaming in that Locker, it did not cry out for vengeance. All you wanted was for Emma to heal, for Sophia to be fixed from the trauma which caused her warped view of the world, and for Madison to be freed from the burden which her social status enforces._ ”

“ _And_ **_that_ ** _, Taylor Hebert, Daughter of Daniel and Annette, is why you were worthy of my power. I’ll leave you to your ruminations to the good you could do. But before I go, I just want to let you know, you don’t have to worry about your loved ones dying or being hurt. My Will prevents such things._ ” The tension began to drain from Taylor.

_“A stray blast from Purity happens to be on the path to cut your sleeping father in half? Don’t worry, he will have had an urge to get up and pee half a minute earlier. Lung is on the rampage path toward the DWU? Don’t worry, they were called to a meeting earlier that day in the warehouse down the street regarding inventory._ ” The tension was now completely gone, she knew her loved ones would be alright, and that was mattered.

She frowned, and nodded to herself.

‘ _It’s a good coincidence that I thought to bring a scarf._ ’ Taylor thought to herself, smirking evilly at that fourth word, and wrapped the red scarf over her mouth and pulled up her hood. She trotted off into Merchant territory, thinking what an excellent coincidence it was that she had the right timing to interrupt a mugging.

And, on cue, she heard, “HELP!”

In a far off office, hovering in a space free from the adorably childish concepts of dimensional limitation and physical tangibility, The Limitless Entity began to chuckle at his warrior’s progress.

“Oh, good. She’s gained some confidence.” He said, admiring his perfect body, which had been the first thing he did to himself when he got his power, and the second had been to hire some excellent women to accompany him.

He leant back into the… _massage_ … from the aforementioned women, and thought of how good it was to have Limitless Power.

Hey, just cause he’s a kindly Limitless Entity didn’t mean he wasn’t a horny one as well.


End file.
